Philips

Royal Philips, founded in 1891 in the Netherlands is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, employing over 105,000 individuals in over 100 countries. It is a leading health technology company with a keen focus on improving people’s health. This spans from healthy living, to diagnosis, treatment, and home care. Philips puts strong emphasis on leveraging the latest in technology, design, and deep consumer insights when developing each of the products in its broad portfolio. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as consumer health and home care.

At Philips, design is a key aspect of the company’s success. According to Philip’s Design Manifesto, “Design is at the heart of our company, shaping the way people experience our brand, products and services. In fact, everything you see from Philips has been designed. As proud custodians of the Philips brand, we make sure design is always the starting point for innovations. And it plays a central role in our business strategy: driving everything we bring to market.”

Jens Andersson joined Philips 3.5 years ago and is a Design Lead at Philips Design. Jens is primarily responsible for the industrial design of products in the Male Grooming department. This consists of shavers, beard trimmers, hair clippers, and more. In his role, Jens also works with other teams to design products including health care, personal health, and CT scanners. Jens is not only responsible for working with marketing and engineering to bring new products to market, but is also, together with the team, tasked with coordinating the brand’s portfolio management and 5-year plan.
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A little over three years ago the team at Philips set out to find a new piece of software for their team that would work better than their current tools. The goal was to find one tool that could be used by all members of the team. This would help to create consistency, easy file transfer/handoff with design peers and engineering, and would increase overall team speed and efficiency. Jens was selected for the Evolve pilot program and set out on a 1-week training course with the tool. Shortly after the course and some one-on-one training, Jens utilized Evolve on a live project.

Evolve in the Design Process

Since learning Evolve, Jens has used Evolve on a number of projects, including three that have already gone to market, as well as multiple strategic projects that Philips is currently exploring in health care, male grooming, and personal health. When asked about Evolve, Jens noted, “As a designer, we are always under pressure to deliver results in a short period of time, Evolve has been a big advantage for me over other conceptual CAD packages. Its construction history features allow me to adapt my models for both business or technical reasons while development is ongoing verses starting from scratch.” Jens also commented on the speed of the tool, “With Evolve I can quickly react and tweak the design while keeping the original design intent. It allows me to work on many quick iterations to visualize different options and solutions. This is very key to our development at Philips as it allows all stakeholders to be involved in the feedback process. I build so much faster in Evolve than what I have ever done in other software before.”

Industry

Personal Care/Personal Health

Challenge

Quickly and easily visualize new product concepts with the goal of working
hand-in-hand with design colleagues and engineering department to share feedback, understand challenges, and ultimately conceptualize final products.

Solution

Concept development and visualization with Evolve to create multiple go-to-market products.

Results

Creation of multiple iterations in a short period of time

Ability to change designs and react quickly to feedback

Increased modeling speed

Improved file surface quality when sending to engineering

Evolve is striking the perfect balance between a conceptual design software and a rigid engineering package. It has the power of construction history and surface control but also allowing conceptual modeling without being too inflexible.

– Jens Andersson
Design Lead, Philips Design

What's Next?

Jens has become extremely productive in Evolve, he has already used it on multiple products that are on the market including the Philips OneBlade, the Philips Health Watch, and the Philips Bodygroom series 1000. Jens noted, “Working in the collaboration-driven environment of Philips design demands tools that I can depend on to help deliver great products to market quickly. Evolve in particular is a powerful software for enabling designs in our fast-paced development environment. It helps me gain speed not only in bringing design concepts to life, but also in driving fast iteration loops with the development team. I especially appreciate the construction history as consumer product development can be a moving target as consumer insight and feasibility is constantly effecting the design. Evolve’s features allow us to intuitively adjust the design throughout the process, generating options and visualizing solutions quickly to keep the design intent intact. Evolve is striking the perfect balance between a conceptual design software and a rigid engineering package. It has the power of construction history and surface control but also allowing conceptual modeling without being too inflexible.” Jens is planning to continue his usage of Evolve while also encouraging and teaching colleagues at Philips Design to learn the tool.

Initial sketches and prototypes of Philips OneBlade

Philips OneBlade design iteration in Evolve

Final Philips OneBlade product

About Philips

Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Philips' health technology portfolio generated 2015 sales of EUR 16.8 billion and employs approximately 70,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter.